Month: October 2009

When a maven build fails in continuous integration you often end up reading the console output, sometimes browsing kilobytes of text (yes, maven outputs a lot and can seem chaotic). To ease build debugging you can tell maven to output some introspectional data.

The idea is to use the maven-help-plugin a lot but you can add others and home made ones to the mix. To quickly see what can easily get outputed my maven you can play with the following commands :

Adding such output at the very start of builds is really handy when setting up a CI service or during build refactorings.

Note that if a profile is defined in a parent pom it won’t be shown as activated in submodules by help:active-profiles but if you read the help:effective-pom output on one of the modules you’ll see it’s effectively activated, see this comment in MNG-3228.

About two years ago I blogged about using HSQLDB to unit test JPA entities. This year, Apache released a Derby version allowing you to use an in memory backend. As I use Derby in software I write, being able to run unit tests on the very same SGBD but in memory is a real gift.